(Note from Jess:) A couple nights ago, I had dinner and a walk with a rad artist/writer/activist/friend who’s known in some Internet parts as Jesimone. Our conversation at the table and as we moved through a neighborhood that she’d once lived in and that is adjacent to mine was wide-ranging, weaving around food; blogging; queer identities; violence; neighborhoods; families; relationships; place; the need to complicate often reductive discourses around whiteness, class, “criminal justice,” and more. We talked about how conversations are walks. And we talked about how, a few weeks ago, she’d taken a (Re)thinking Walking walk of her own. We decided today would be a good time to share her walk with you. And, so, after the jump, a guest walk by Jesimone.  

For the past few weeks I’ve been dealing with some pretty severe muscle spasms in my lower back. The pain has been sucking up most of my energy and focus. I have a tendency to isolate myself as it is. I mostly work from home and I can go for days without leaving the house, washing my hair, putting on anything besides pajamas and a sweatshirt. Breaking out of that can be a challenge. Since I’ve been limited in my movements by the back pain, just getting out of bed has also been challenging recently. Luckily I live with my partner, who has been pretty awesome about taking up the slack in terms of daily choirs and picking up the things I drop and can’t bend over to retrieve. 

Of course my partner works, so there are a lot of hours on my own. Quite a lot in fact since Von has two jobs right now, working a full time week at a queer arts org and a weekend grave shift dispatching at a limo company. I am recently unemployed. My academic teaching “career” just came to an end. My summer course was cancelled and the gig I had for the fall was cut down to almost nothing. And, after three years on the job market, I can no longer afford to be an adjunct professor, working with no health care benefits, while trying to land an elusive tenure track job that has become an even scarcer possibility with the economic collapse. So I filed for unemployment, put my student loans (back) into forbearance, and dusted off my customer service resume.

More than one person had told me lower back pain is connected to financial stress.

Yesterday I was extremely depressed. I felt like my back was never going to heal, and the allergic reaction I had to the pain meds the dr. prescribed, swollen eyelids and a rash on my face, didn’t seem to be getting better. I woke up today determined not to give in to the depression again but not sure how to avoid it. Laying in bed perusing tweet (twat?) links I read WCD’s post on her walk with her friend and then explored the first few posts about (re)thinking walking by bfp and Jess. I was moved. I got my ass out of bed to go for a walk.

As you can see from the picture of my kitty,

I have other reasons to want to stay in bed all day. Despite Sadie’s beautiful blue eyes, I knew the walk was the salve for my back and my depression. I walk through my neighborhood a lot. But I’m usually pretty caught up in my own head. It has generally been a solitary act. Sometimes I’m with Von, but it’s something we do together as a couple and not as a part of our larger communities or politics. We are another set of individuals sharing the street with other individuals, but not necessarily connecting.  Today I walked in connection with Jess and bfp and WCD and her friend, I wouldn’t be alone out there. I grabbed my camera and headed out.

As soon as I walk out the door I am confronted by my motley crue of plants. Mostly propagated cacti and succulents liberated from the medians of the picturesque, and pictured here, Hollywood Hills.

Amongst my plants is this one in the brown planter that I got from a friend in Seattle before I moved to LA- almost a decade ago. She has cystic fibrosis and needs lots of plants in her house to create extra oxygen. The beginning of this walk, and all my walks, is the connection I keep to Leslie through this plant. 

I walk out the door and am in connection with family too. Across from Leslie’s plant is the birdbath pictured.

Von’s mom made it for us. There is also an awesome crazy cactus/succulant thing from a dear friend, Sarah, who now lives out of state, a friend I wouldn’t have made it through my MFA program without. 

I exit my apartment complex and am immediately confronted by the intense beauty of other plants and flowers in my neighbors’ yards. I literally stop and smell the “roses.” I stop to take in the gorgeous shapes and colors, some you can see in the pictures here.

I’ve barely made it 20 paces and the depression and sense of isolation has lifted. I’m in the present, aware of the beauty surrounding me, feeling the spring air on my face, touching and smelling nature even though I live in the massive megalopolis of Los Angeles. I am a part of long lasting friendships. I am a part of a loving relationship that is my home no matter the structure we rent. Together we have many families and communities. I am in movement. Slowly, determinedly, I connect to my own self, my own body. And in these few paces I connect to many other women I know and know of who are equally determined to move through pain, determined to make change.

And the juju kicked in.

When I first moved to West Hollywood I kept making cracks about living in a neighborhood where white people do yoga in the park. We moved here because we were priced out of our old neighborhood, a racially and ethnically diverse part of Hollywood where little Armenia and Thai Town come together. Ironically we found cheaper rent in a part of town not known for being inexpensive. West Hollywood is gay, as in two white men double income gaaaaay. Despite that, my partner feels more comfortable in this part of town. Here, Von feels (his) genderqueer, pronoun defying self is not seen as a constant disruption to het claimed public space. It’s less painful to be misread as a butch dyke or young boy when the one doing the reading doesn’t want to do you physical and psychical harm.

I can be a judgmental asshole in my own right, assuming things from my own viewpoint, assuming my vision somehow cuts through the surface and sees something more real than other people see through their eyes. While walking today, I got yet another much needed reminder of how my judgment brings forth the discomfort I can feel about my own whiteness, A discomfort that arises when I delve into another layer of learning about my Sephardic and Romani roots. Those feelings of discomfort are some side of the many coins that lead to unintentional racist/white supremacist thinking. Rather than de-centering whiteness, those uncomfortable feelings become a huge glaring mass of ugliness that is impossible not to crash into. These days, when I knock my head up against this, the pain shoots out to new internal places. 

This pain is confusion about my personal relationship to whiteness, something I don’t deny but something that isn’t simple or fixed. The history of racial construction in the US is manifest in this state of confusion. I’m white and I’m not quite white, to borrow a term from Karen Brodkin that I’m not quite sure about (it’s from the book, “How Jews Became White Folks And What That Says About Race in America”). To only be white is to deny the pain my father’s immigrant family experienced as they became Americans. He is, they are, the generation of Eastern European Jews who pulled themselves up into whiteness. But his family was not considered white when they arrived in the US, and were, of course, genocidally considered not white where they came from. This history is further complicated by their being Sephardic and Gypsy (Romani). 

When I deny, or am denied, parts of my ethnicity and race I deny my grandmother Ilonka’s experience of having her cousin, my grandfather, bring her to the US against her will to be his wife and the years she spent unhappy and pissed off, in and out of psychiatric institutions while making my father’s life unbearable with her misery. If I don’t acknowledge all of my own roots, I don’t acknowledge my Ukranian great grandmother, Sanna, who my mom is named for, who died in the bathtub because she or her rabbi husband purposefully pushed the radio into the water – another example of the inextricable link between suicide and homicide in domestic violence. The weight of these histories are fucking intense. I don’t always know how to hold them in my being. I don’t always know the least destructive way to let them go. I don’t always know how to be truthful to or about who I am.

While I was thinking about this, I entered the park down the street from my building. 

There were definitely some folks sunning and exercising. Some evidently of color, some evidently white, but really, who knows. I can’t make assumptions there any more than someone can about me. Or about Von for that matter. What we think we see may not be the only reality- or the reality of the one we’re looking at, the one we are not. 

Besides the folks sunning, 

there was also the old man with his infant grandchild in the stroller, the other old men playing chess, the moms hanging out talking while their kids ran around on the playground, gay and straight guys doing pull ups at the sand lot next to the tennis courts, queer women walking their dogs,* teenagers playing basketball, and Sandy. 

Sandy beckoned me over to her. She was sitting at a picnic table keeping an eye on her grandson who was playing on the swings. She said she wanted to give me reading, she said she had a gift and could tell I had just come through a rough year. She saw in my aura that change was coming. I like these exchanges. Am familiar with the con. Of course she was ultimately looking for cash. But the negotiations, her need for a stroller for her grandson and the fact that I just lost my job, didn’t keep us from having an interesting moment together. I wanted to ask if she was Romani, we looked like we could be related. But I didn’t. It’s a hard question to ask, like it is asking anyone “what are you?”  The power differentials float around and don’t always settle comfortably once it asked and answered- or not answered. 

Once, back in my old neighborhood I was talking to Jon, a proudly Armenian mechanic I had been bringing my car to for years, when he went off on “gypsies.” I was intrigued, I hadn’t heard someone suggest so matter of factly, even if racistly, there was a Rom community in the midst of Little Armenia. Jon paused for a second and said, “You aren’t gypsy are you?” Ah, that fucked up moment I’ve been in many times, someone clocking me for something, but not quite sure. I’m not always what it is their vitriol is assuming, and I never had anyone in the US actually ask me outright about this part of myself. I was fascinated even though my stomach knotted up into the familiar fight or flight alarm. Always cautious about when and where I out my various selves, I didn’t identify myself to Sandy or ask directly if she was gypsy. But in our conversation, she named her ethnicity in the familiar way diasporic peoples do – cautiously, claiming heritage or background rather than saying “I am ________,” rather than feeling safe enough to be that which one is.

I walked away from Sandy and passed the Holocaust memorial in the park. It must have been Holocaust Remembrance day because there were candles and flowers surrounding the marker.

I paused to remember my Jewish and Romani relatives, feeling a bit off balance that I was able to do so right here, outwardly, in public, on *this* walk.

I also paused to acknowledge the Palestinians I am inextricably linked to, the tragedy of the hatred and ignorance perpetuated in the name of my relatives’ deaths, the tragedy of justification that occurs when identity is formed through historical victimization. 

In that moment I realized how fucking cool my neighborhood is. The levels of diversity are vast and well represented in the park that I was once ignorant enough to only see whiteness. Certainly most racial categories on the US census were present. And the range in age, economic status, citizenship, religion, ability, sexuality, gender, it goes on and on. I so fit in here, so many pieces of the puzzle, so much of the politics I live and breathe and am invested in, fit together in this space. My people, my allies, my adversaries, my neighbors, we are all here in the park. Together.

And there is even art. One of the most fundamental (and conflicted after earning my MFA) parts of who I am. There were a bunch of new sculptures installed, part of some City of West Hollywood venture. How cool that an art initiative didn’t get cut in this economy and that there is art in the park to interact with.

The different pieces were interesting and represented the community well. Like the large white cone sound piece pictured, the way it is harmonious and integrated with the space, both standing out but also blending in visually, it’s lines moving in the same direction as the natural environment. Or this other one pictured that is broken, stepped on, seemingly in someone’s way, someone who moved through the space too quickly, unthinkingly, only focused on their own sightlines. 

This is where I am in movement everyday, whether I am conscious of it or not. My neighbors are the folks who I daily negotiate the privileges and pains of having or not having power. My neighbors are a group I am a part of, a group that provides constant learning opportunities. Sometimes we talk to each other, chatting briefly about the kids or the dogs nearby, or praising the produce at the weekly farmer’s market held behind the tennis courts. Sometimes we’re suspicious of each other’s motivations, cautiously avoiding any interactions. A lot of times we are happy to just smile as we pass by each other on our walks, knowing we share this space, that we all belong here with all of our histories, with all of our presence.

* I am making assumptions about some folks’ sexuality, but it’s the privilege of being an insider to a particular group. Clocking from within versus from the outside is a way queers, who are not always visually evident, feel a form of power in places we are in the minority. It’s a way to feel less invisible/more visible. And because I live in an area that a lot of gay folks live in, there is some truth to being able to identify someone based on how they look because it is safer to be out in public here than many many other places. Except of course the homophobes come here to bash… it’s complicated. Trust me, those folks in the park today were my queer peeps.